Quality of life in patients after laparoscopic repair of inguinal hernia

OBJECTIVE The assessment of the health-related quality of life has been internationally acknowledged during the past decades as a reliable method in the assessment of the effectiveness of medical procedures. This paper reports on the assessment of the health-related quality of life of patients who had undergone laparoscopic repair of an inguinal hernia. This assessment focused on the three main dimensions of physical, mental and social health. METHOD Data collection was carried out at the Third Surgical Clinic of "G. Gennimatas" General Hospital of Athens, in 2008-2009 with the use of the self-administered instrument "health survey SF-36", which consists of 36 questions constituting 8 scales of physical and socio-mental health. The sample consisted of 100 patients who had undergone laparoscopic repair of an inguinal hernia. The majority of the patients were men (86.9%), aged over 65 years (47%) and between 56-64 years old (25%). RESULTS The rating of the scales of the review SF-36 gave the following results: "physical functioning" 70.8 (SD 18.6), "physical role" 63.7 (SD 38.6), "physical pain" 48.5 (SD 4.7), "general health" 62.2 (SD 14.1), "vitality" 73.3 (SD 22.3), "social functioning" 68.3 (SD 26.6), "emotional role" 64.2 (SD 36.2), "mental health" 78.4 (SD 18.8). Linear regression analysis showed that 6 of the 8 scales of the health survey SF-36: "physical functioning" (B=0.860, t=5.901, p=0.000), "physical role" (B=0.658, t=3.378, p=0.002), "general health" (B=0.639, t=4.079, p=0.000), "vitality" (B=0.662, t=3.638, p=0.001), "social operability" (B=0.608, t=4.097, p=0.000), "mental health" (B=0.653, t=3.231, p=0.003) were related to the patients' satisfaction with the quality of life, while, in addition, "physical functioning" (B=-0.380, t=-2.986, p=0.005) and "social functioning" (B=-0.425, t=-3.282, p=0.002) showed an inverse relationship with age. CONCLUSIONS Patients who have undergone laparoscopic repair of an inguinal hernia appear to assess their socio-mental health (average 71.0) as more important than their physical health (average 61.3). This finding raises the issue of non-concurrence of the individual assessment of patients between the objective (physical functioning, physical role, physical pain, general health) and the subjective (vitality, mental role, social functioning, mental health) dimensions of health-related quality of life.